Your children are your children. That sounds obvious, but sometimes it seems that the government assumes that your children are their children. And they want to decide just about everything concerning them. But you, not the government nor anyone else, have the obligation to decide what is best for your children – hopefully under God’s guidance.
You know them best, you love them more than anyone else. So you teach, you disciple your children the values that you believe in. They will grow up and make their own choices, but when they are under your care, with your love, knowledge, and commitment to their good, you decide.
When our children were young, and we went to the library, my children would bring me picture books that they wanted to borrow, and I would quickly skim through these books and tell them “yes” or “no”, based on the content.
I did the same with children’s novels. There was a certain popular series when my oldest daughter was about eight, that had about thirty books all together and “everybody” was reading them. They didn’t align with our values. We lived in a suburb of Montreal at that time, where families would join an outdoor pool for the summer for a very reasonable fee, and that would entitle all the members of the family to participate in any amount of classes, as well as swim anytime the pool was open. My children all had lessons in the mornings and my daughters were on swim teams and we spent a lot of time there (peer pressure alert).
All these swimming buddies were reading and exchanging these books, and offering them to my daughter. I told her I didn’t want her reading them. But friends kept offering them. Finally one day, I told my daughter, “You read the book and I will read the book, and you can tell me what’s good and what’s bad about the book.” So we each read it and when I asked, “What is good about the book?” my daughter replied, “Nothing.” (She didn’t mean it was all bad, but rather that there was nothing especially good about it – kind of neutral fluff for the most part.) “What is bad about the book?” And my daughter was able to point out a couple of things that didn’t align with our values. We did the same with one more book in the series, and my daughter was able to understand why I didn’t want her reading them. Asking her to evaluate what was good and bad about the book, helped her develop her critical thinking skills.
We have pre-screened all movies our children watched (up to a certain age) because we were badly surprised on more than one occasion at what had been added or changed even to a story that we knew and loved from having read the book. Even movies highly recommended by other Believers have on occasion seriously disappointed us.
So – no apologies – I think my husband and I did exactly what we are supposed to have done as parents.
I highly encourage that you stay on top of what is being read and watched in your house, teaching your children to interact with the different messages that they hear from various places, and develop their critical thinking skills. These skills will be an essential part of their lives. (More on that in my next post: “Teaching Children to Think – Part 2.”)
